Sacrifice, Atonement, and Presence: Maybe Leviticus Doesn’t Mean What We Think? (Phil Bray) Ep #234

Dru Johnson (00:00)
What happens when an Australian butcher starts a comedic YouTube channel about Leviticus? that’s right, you heard me. It was Leviticus that he started a comedic YouTube channel about. In this episode, we talked to Phil Bray, who started reading Leviticus as a butcher and thinking he saw things that other people were He started working out a lot of that material on his YouTube channel where he does lots of funny bits and ⁓ short

And then eventually he realized he had a lot of a material that would make a great book. And so in this episode, we’re going to talk about how he sees butchering, slaughtering, killing animals, ⁓ and the act of atonement in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and why he thinks Leviticus is fun.

Phil Bray (00:48)
it started with atonement. It started with a statement. So I was in a men’s group. ⁓ It was called Beers and Bibles. And we’d meet on a Monday night just ⁓ in a mate’s living room. ⁓ We’d bring a can of beer and just chat about the Bible. It was kind of, it was a little bit for people who were wandering away from church, but would be happy to drink a beer and chat about the Bible. ⁓

So I found myself there, not that I was wandering away from church, but there I found myself. And someone just said some throwaway comment about Jesus on the cross, which I had assumed was true, assumed was the gospel. ⁓ But the kind of long story or the history is that I’d been listening to a lot of Bible Project and NT Wright, and they’d kind of given me the freedom and the

Dru Johnson (01:31)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (01:44)
the license, maybe the ownership to go back and read the Bible for myself, just kind of outside of maybe the tradition I’d grew up in. So I went home and tried to find that throwaway line in the Bible and I couldn’t find it. And then weeks later, I was still looking for that idea in the Bible. And I thought maybe it’s like the Trinity where it’s this doctrine that’s not explicitly stated, but it’s there. And the deeper I dug, the more I found that it wasn’t there.

at all. ⁓ And then at some point I found myself in Leviticus and I’m still not sure why but Leviticus made sense and it was kind of a way to chat about atonement without getting into the really nasty angry debates about atonement. Because I found that maybe it’s because of my butchering background that I understood that part of Leviticus but

Dru Johnson (02:35)
Mm.

Phil Bray (02:42)
I found and understanding ancient atonement, sorry, ancient sacrifice really helped with the atonement debate. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (02:48)
Yeah.

You might be the only person in history who said, so I went to Leviticus, and that made a lot of sense to me.

Phil Bray (02:55)
Yeah,

I’m still not sure exactly why, but there’s something about Leviticus

Dru Johnson (03:01)
Well, so I was working on a book on ritual years ago. ⁓ I, you know, obviously Leviticus came up in that book because it’s got a little bit of ritual in it. But ⁓ I resorted to just like ⁓ stick figure drawing out every single thing I was reading. And that’s when I came across the stark realization that, there’s not enough information here to actually do these rituals, to perform these rituals. ⁓

Phil Bray (03:19)
Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (03:29)
And then I read some people who confirmed that that that’s actually not a wild view, but that it’s it’s it rides on a wave of already previous knowledge of rituals, how rituals work. And you seem to have some of that previous knowledge. So you’re a butcher and you’re in Australia. So is it lamb? Is that what you spend a lot of time? Lamb and cow? Is that what you butcher mainly? And pig, guess.

Phil Bray (03:56)
Yeah, lamb.

Yeah. So we’ll get lambs, five lambs on a hook. And when, when I was working in a big butcher shop, we’d get maybe a hundred lambs delivered at once. And yeah. And you’d spend, ⁓ dead. Yeah. Without the head. So, yeah. And so you’d spend the morning kind of breaking up.

Dru Johnson (04:08)
Whoa, alive or dead?

Okay, so, okay.

Phil Bray (04:21)
lambs. So you take the forequarter off, take the legs off and then straight down the middle of the saddle and divide it up into its cutlets and loins and the chump we call it. Not sure what you call the chump chops.

Dru Johnson (04:34)
I don’t know

to what that refers. I don’t know lamb cuts either, so it wouldn’t help.

Phil Bray (04:38)
Yeah, okay.

I ended up in a more of a supermarket. So while I used to break up beef when I was an apprentice in the supermarket, the beef comes like vacuum packed. So we’re more just slicing steaks with the beef.

Dru Johnson (04:55)
That’s convenient. Yeah.

I remember when I was in the military, was on a deserted island. There were like 20 of us on it that was owned by Hondurans. It was a great deployment. the guy who owned the cows on the island came out on a boat one day and said, hey, you help me slaughter some cows, I’ll take you out on my boat. So we did. And we butchered one of the cows and ⁓ put the legs up on a forklift.

Phil Bray (05:21)
Mm.

Dru Johnson (05:24)
lifted it up all the way up. We had a little dirt runway there, so we had some equipment. ⁓ the overwhelming sensation that I had participating in that, to the little bit that they let me participate is, this is a ton of work. And this is before I was a Christian. And then I remember when I got into Leviticus thinking like, I thought the priesthood was like the spiritual job, but now I think more of it like.

This is blue collar. This is mainly blue collar work, right? ⁓ Is this issue of butchering and helping and accepting butchering parts. ⁓ Sorry, that was a long aside to say. you look at an animal and you think of it as its constituent parts, how does that help you understand Leviticus versus me, who I didn’t ever hunt or anything like that. that was my only experience. Hunting cows was literally my only experience hunting. ⁓

Phil Bray (06:19)
Yeah.

Dru Johnson (06:19)
I assume you just see things differently than I do in Leviticus. ⁓ So what is it that you see that the average person doesn’t?

Phil Bray (06:26)
Yeah, you’re right. is hard work and they’re really heavy. Yeah. Yeah. And a forklift would be a ⁓ great tool to lift up ⁓ a dead cow or a bull or an ox. ⁓ Yeah. Like we, when they get delivered, they’re in four quarters and most of the drivers who deliver the meat will carry in one at a time.

Dru Johnson (06:33)
Yes, all dead bodies are heavy. That’s one thing I learned in the military.

Okay.

Phil Bray (06:56)
the really strong guys might carry two, ⁓ but there’s no one carrying four quarters or like a whole cow. ⁓ But the thing that actually made the connection for me, I was reading ⁓ Mary Douglas ⁓ about the kidneys in the middle of the animal. ⁓ And she kind of has this idea that the kidneys are in the center and that represents the most holy place.

Dru Johnson (07:12)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (07:25)
And they’re surrounded by a layer of fat. that might be the curtain around the kidneys because God gets the fat and the kidneys and no one else is allowed to eat those parts, which corresponds to the most holy place. But as she was talking about that, I thought, yeah, the kidneys are in the middle and they are surrounded by this thick layer of pure white fat because that was my job as an apprentice was to pull out all the kidneys and they are in the very center. But

Dru Johnson (07:30)
Right.

Phil Bray (07:54)
If you look at it on a picture, they’re not really in the center, but when they sit on my, on the butcher’s block, they are quite obviously in the center of the animal. And I think that clicked and I was like, ⁓ I, that’s something that I would know that maybe no one else who’s studying Leviticus would know. ⁓ so that gave me the idea to write the book. ⁓ but yeah, there’s a few things like that, that like the livers being really heavy. I’m like, yeah, they’re surprisingly heavy.

Dru Johnson (08:04)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (08:24)
having handled lots of livers compared to kidneys, they’re quite heavy and compared to meat, the livers are really dense organ. ⁓ And that’s actually what it means in Hebrew. It’s kind of, it means like heavy or weighty, which is fascinating. ⁓ Yeah, so, yeah.

Dru Johnson (08:42)
Okay, so

I want to connect some dots here because I remember reading that in Mary Douglas and lots of things in Mary Douglas where I’m like, yeah, right. ⁓ Because she does sometimes, I love Mary Douglas and I love her work, but she does sometimes in my opinion seem to over read things ⁓ or she tries to systematize a little bit more beyond what I’m comfortable with. But.

I’ve never butchered a lamb, so what do I know, right? So was that for you just a point of interest or you think like that cemented that what she’s saying is the right interpretation?

Phil Bray (09:15)
Yeah, no, I’m not sure that it is the right interpretation. But it more made me think that it’s more than just killing an animal. It’s kind of, there’s something more going on. So even though kidneys represent like their deep inner emotions and the livers represent kind of weighty emotion, I don’t know that that’s what they thought when they placed that on the altar. But it would have been like in their

Dru Johnson (09:25)
Mm.

Phil Bray (09:44)
cultural river, maybe as John Walton would say. I don’t think that that was the symbol. Like maybe if we took out a heart from an animal and placed it on the dinner plate, we wouldn’t be thinking, ⁓ someone loves me because a heart is a symbol of love. But, yeah, but you know, if maybe you sat with it for a while, that idea might come up. There might be some connection.

Dru Johnson (09:46)
Right. Yeah.

It’s really good analogy.

Hmm.

Phil Bray (10:10)
But yeah, think yeah, I think she’s maybe stretching it a little bit too far. But it’s something in the Jewish style of meditation. It’s something fascinating to think about.

Dru Johnson (10:36)
Yeah,

I find her work very energizing. It gets you thinking in lots of different, and one of her points is that there’s spatial reasoning going on in the thinking of the text, and if we’re not understanding that, we’re missing some of the elements, which I think she’s right about. ⁓ Okay, maybe you can help, maybe you’re gonna totally blow up my idea here, but I have been saying for years, ⁓

based on very little evidence and experience of my own, that ⁓ most people that handled and butchered animals in the ancient world all the way up until the present, that they wouldn’t have seen the actual killing of the animal as a violent event. That wouldn’t be equated to like murder. Because honestly in the classroom, that’s the first thing that people come up Why are we murdering all these animals? I’m like, I don’t know if that’s the conceptual world of butchering, is murdering. Do you think of it as a violent event?

Phil Bray (11:34)
⁓ No, in a word. Yeah, I agree. think because we’re so removed from ⁓ the way our food is prepared, are kind of horrified. We eat ⁓ a burger every day, Maybe not every day, it’s not healthy. But ⁓ yeah, if you eat meat. Yeah. But like something had to die for that burger to exist.

Dru Johnson (11:36)
Okay.

Right.

Right. Some people do. Americans certainly do.

Phil Bray (12:04)
for the burger in your hand to be a thing. There was a death involved, but we don’t associate eating a burger with death. And I think it’s the same jump that we’re making if we associate sacrifice immediately and primarily with a death. Yeah, to prepare a meal and to prepare a feast of meat, there has to be a death. But the…

You will read scholars, ⁓ and it’s not hard to find, which is unfortunate, who say that the act of sacrifice was supposed to be painful and violent. And it’s supposed to teach the Israelite that that’s what, I included in the book some quotes where a couple of scholars say ⁓ the slaughter was signifying a violent and painful death. And that’s what the offer deserved. Well, that was teaching the Israelite that

Dru Johnson (13:00)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (13:02)
that’s the death that they deserved. Which is, maybe we can talk about that later, but it’s really harmful if you’ve just had your period or you’ve just been to your parents’ funeral or touched a dead body and now someone’s telling you that you deserve a painful death because you’re unclean. That’s pretty harmful, I think.

Dru Johnson (13:04)
Hmm.

Yeah, well, and you can certainly imagine how Christian preachers could easily get, you know, that’ll preach, as they say, ⁓ very easily.

Phil Bray (13:32)
Yeah.

But all that to say that the death, we don’t know for sure, but we can assume that compared to ⁓ other nations, the Hebrew way of slaughtering an animal was as painless as possible. If you’re going to slaughter an animal, the way to do it is the way that we imagine the Hebrew priests and people did. It was painless. An animal couldn’t be blemished, so it couldn’t be bruised.

Dru Johnson (13:50)
Yeah.

Phil Bray (14:02)
or beaten or have a broken bone. ⁓ And can I tell my story about the, so when I was an apprentice butcher, we visited a abattoir or a slaughterhouse. ⁓ And it just so happened that that day was the Jewish slaughter day. ⁓ Is it a Shosha? Do you know the name for the man who does the kosher slaughtering? Shosha, don’t know. ⁓

Dru Johnson (14:26)
I don’t know any Judaisms.

Phil Bray (14:32)
So, and that was rare. Like, I don’t know how often they did it, but normally there’s ⁓ a gun that shoots a bolt into the head of the animal and that kind of immediately stuns them. ⁓ But Jewish, the modern and current way of slaughtering an animal, of Jewish slaughtering an animal is with a really, really, really sharp knife. ⁓ And so between each slaughter, he would run

his fingernail along the blade of the knife, ⁓ like literally between each time that he cut the throat. And he was testing for a little imperfection in the blade. And yeah, your eyes are the right reaction because it’s a super sharp knife. And so if he found a little imperfection or a nick in the blade of the knife, he’d take out his sharpening stone.

Dru Johnson (15:15)
Whoa.

Phil Bray (15:29)
and sharpen it back to a perfect edge and then he tested again. And if he was happy with it, then he could continue. And it’s two reasons. So one is that the slaughter was supposed to be as quick and painless as possible. And a little nick in the knife might be enough to cause more harm than needed. But also if the blade was impure, it meant that the animal was also like now blemished, not unblemished. And so…

it wouldn’t be considered a kosher animal anymore. So that’s not in the Bible, but that’s how the Jewish kind of thinking has evolved that, yeah, even that the act of slaughter has to be an unblemished process.

Dru Johnson (16:15)
I would call that a ⁓ faithful improvisation on what the Torah teaches, right? It’s trying to extend the thinking into even the kind of knife you use, even how often you sharpen it, right? ⁓

Phil Bray (16:19)
Mm. Mm.

Yep.

Well the Torah doesn’t even tell us to use a knife

Dru Johnson (16:30)
No, yeah, exactly. Well,

it does on one ritual, ⁓ on circumcision, you’re to use a stone knife rather than a, which is really fascinating because they had metal knives, but God’s like, no, no, no, no. You would use a Flint knife ⁓ to be circumcised, which if you’ve ever seen old, you can find them in some like the Louvre or the British museum or, you know, the Metropolitan. They, they usually have a section where they have some Flint knives, like Egyptian Flint knives or something. ⁓

Phil Bray (16:46)
⁓ I didn’t know that. Yeah, okay.

Dru Johnson (17:00)
And it’s mildly terrifying, if you think about it. I’m sure it was very effective, because they can be very sharp, but terrifying to look at, I guess. ⁓ Yeah, and I think what you say about the issue of the kind of those bad, the bad reasoning around a sacrifice that it’s something has to die in your place. It just doesn’t square with what Leviticus teaches either, like, OK, well, I can bring a grain offering in certain circumstances, ⁓ oil and grain. ⁓

Phil Bray (17:02)
Yeah.

Mm.

Dru Johnson (17:28)
But nobody thinks of a sacrifice, this is Christian Eberhard makes a great ⁓ point on this and Catherine McClime and that the word sacrifice, we equate it to the death of an animal, but it’s not actually equated to the death of an animal. Lots of things count as a sacrifice. Both Cain and Abel’s offerings were sacrifices even though they’re called Merchada. So nobody thinks of the grain sacrifice as a violent sacrifice ⁓ as well. Wesley Bergen, go ahead.

Phil Bray (17:56)
⁓ Yeah. And there’s

no instruction to pound the grain or to ⁓ grind the grain into a fine powder. If they wanted to communicate violence or destruction, they could do that.

Dru Johnson (18:02)
Right.

Right. No, that’s a great point. ⁓

yeah, think the, ⁓ sorry, it led me to another idea that what you just said and it’s gone. Okay. That’s how it goes with my brain these days. Okay. So as a butcher, you’re looking at animals and you’re reading Leviticus, but I mean, if we’re just honest, Leviticus is only the first.

Phil Bray (18:23)
Ha

Dru Johnson (18:34)
chapters are the ones where you really talk about butchering animals. ⁓ You ⁓ started this YouTube channel called Leviticus is Fun, is that that’s the name of it correct? ⁓ Which is ⁓ is a pretty hilarious YouTube channel so I don’t even go there for the Leviticus content I only go there for the jokes so but ⁓ I imagine some people in your life as you describe this they think maybe you’ve lost it a little bit or

Phil Bray (18:44)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yep.

Dru Johnson (19:03)
⁓ kind a little bit kooky. Would you tell the average Australian on the street, like, I run a YouTube channel, it’s called Leviticus’ Fund, and expect them to understand what you’re talking about? Okay.

Phil Bray (19:11)
You ⁓

⁓ no, I, I’ve

come up, I normally tell people that it’s about ancient sacrifice and then I kind of gauge their reaction from that about whether I mentioned Leviticus, ⁓ how quickly I jumped to the Bible. Yeah. ⁓ and depending, most people, which is weird, most people go straight to like human sacrifice. ⁓

Dru Johnson (19:23)
that sounds sexier. Yeah.

That’s smart.

Phil Bray (19:45)
They’re like, ⁓ so, you know, have you, have you talked about human sacrifice? And I’m well, no, I haven’t. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ so I started, I started the YouTube channel, basically because I was writing a book, ⁓ and like a, yeah. Yeah, that one. and I don’t have a, I don’t have any letters after my name.

Dru Johnson (19:45)
Okay.

It’s not supposed to happen, yeah.

book here, Leviticus on the Butcher’s Block.

Phil Bray (20:14)
I don’t have a doctorate or a PhD or anything. ⁓ So I’m kind of a nobody who is a butcher who’s obsessed with Leviticus. So I… ⁓

Dru Johnson (20:23)
Don’t worry,

there are a ton of people with PhD after their names that are nobodies as well. We are legion.

Phil Bray (20:27)
Yeah.

So the YouTube channel was just a way to kind of ⁓ basically test the waters, see what people were kind of excited about and see how, work out how to communicate really nerdy, Leviticus ideas to people. Yeah, and get my name out there as well.

Dru Johnson (20:51)
Yeah. I mean, you say you’re nobody. ⁓

And I can see that, especially if you’re looking at books and people like John Walton who writes, God loved John, but he’s putting out the lost world of whatever every other week. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, so there’s a lot of intimidating flow of information there. But for me, it’s slightly more exciting when lay people, people who don’t have professional education, get into the text and figure it out on their own. ⁓ then, I mean, we’re all reading other people to help us think through things, but.

To me, that’s the exciting thing about the Hebrew Bible is that you, a butcher without the letters after your name, figured out stuff that I couldn’t figure out. I I’ve certainly read this book and learned some new things that I had never thought about before my entire life. And I’ve written a few books ⁓ in and around Leviticus, right? So ⁓ that’s the beauty of the whole system. ⁓ So for you, was the… Why did you want to get this into a book out there into the world? Why not just like… ⁓

teach Leviticus for the next 10 years at Sunday school and your church.

Phil Bray (22:01)
Um, yeah. So, I mean, I, I’d always wanted to write. I think when I was at school, I kind of, that was my dream was to write, but I wanted to write fantasy books. I wanted to write about like castles and goblins and elves. Um, yeah. Yeah. Um, that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to write about the Bible.

Dru Johnson (22:14)
What kind of fantasy?

I hate that stuff, but I’m glad there’s people who enjoy that. Yeah.

Phil Bray (22:32)
But yeah, when I hadn’t, so when I was nerding out on Leviticus and sacrifice and atonement, my job at the moment, I do a lot of driving. And so was listening to lots of audio books and lectures and podcasts and kind of as I drive, I dictate notes into my phone. So at one point I added up all the words in a word count and I had like 20,000 words of notes.

Dru Johnson (23:01)
⁓ yeah.

Phil Bray (23:02)
And then like a couple of months later, had 40,000 words and I thought, ⁓ maybe I should turn this into something like a book or something. ⁓ And I kind of did, but it was too big and sprawling and terrible. But then when the butcher idea came along, I thought I’ve kind of already got all the information. Let’s just make that into a more concise butcher focused book. So yeah, it kind of it was two things that I

Dru Johnson (23:19)
Yeah.

Phil Bray (23:30)
enjoyed, like I wanted to write ⁓ but then when I, Leviticus was the thing that I was passionate about, nerding out about, ⁓ so I just combined the two basically.

Dru Johnson (23:45)
I assume in Australia, as it is in the United States, that when people talk about the book they like the least in the Bible, Leviticus is right up there with Numbers, the twin towers of unlikability. And the channel’s called Leviticus is Fun. So what is the most fun about Leviticus for you? Which part do you get giddy at?

Phil Bray (23:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. Yep.

⁓ To be honest, it’s just helped me make sense of the stuff that never made sense before. So I had assumed that the animal was slaughtered on the altar without thinking too deeply about it. You don’t have to think even that much about it before you realize that that’s impossible because the altar’s on fire.

Dru Johnson (24:24)
Mm.

Right. you meant, you thought it was actually

like the work was done on the alternate. okay. Okay. Gotcha.

Phil Bray (24:37)
Yeah, yeah.

And bulls are really heavy. You’re not going to get a bull up steps onto an altar. ⁓ And they’re going to resist when they see that someone’s trying to put them into the flames. So, ⁓ but things like that. ⁓ I think just because I just assumed that what I’d been taught was right about atonement and, you know, everyone’s so obsessed with death and killing and pain.

Dru Johnson (24:52)
Right.

Phil Bray (25:07)
⁓ and Leviticus was just, it sounds weird to say, but maybe a breath of fresh air to understand it in as a ritual that had meaning apart from it’s all about death. ⁓ and that, so one of the surprising things for me is that I’ve really come to love the idea of liturgy, ⁓ and ritual and the meaning that’s, that’s not stated.

Dru Johnson (25:20)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Bray (25:36)
or isn’t kind of explicit in the words. But as you do, as you experience something, it can teach you something that words can’t communicate. So in my, I don’t know about your tradition or your church, but where I am in Sydney, Sydney, Anglican, it’s very cognitive. ⁓ So the focus is on the preached word. ⁓ It’s all about kind of

a cognitive affirmation of understanding the text. ⁓ And even to the point of ⁓ like, they might not want ⁓ pictures in church. ⁓ They wouldn’t want anything that might distract from the sermon, which is the main thing. Or the most that we actually say, the most important thing that we do is ⁓ read the Bible.

it’s kind of implicit that they mean preach on the Bible. ⁓ So yeah, it was surprising that I came away from a couple of years in Leviticus really appreciating the smells and the sights and the sounds and the tastes and all of that would have communicated to something that, you know, a cognitive sermon couldn’t communicate and the Lord’s Supper as well.

Dru Johnson (26:59)
Yeah.

Phil Bray (27:02)
becomes something that’s super special.

Dru Johnson (27:04)
Let’s talk about the smells for a little bit. ⁓ I don’t, I’m just going to admit it. I don’t like frankincense. I don’t like the incense they use in the smells and bells churches. And by saying, I don’t like it. mean, in the same sense that, you know, some people who eat cilantro or what do you guys call cilantro in Australia? coriander? Yeah. Coriander. So you use the British. Okay. So coriander, cilantro, some people it tastes like soap to them. I don’t know if you know this.

Phil Bray (27:13)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ Coriander, yep.

Dru Johnson (27:33)
That’s how frankincense, it gives me a headache. I don’t like the smell of it. ⁓ But when I think about Leviticus, there is a very ⁓ olfactory world going on there, right? It is a lot of smell. So what are the kinds of things that we’re gonna be smelling if we’re, you your workaday priest working in the outer courts?

Phil Bray (27:52)
Yeah, so the incense definitely, ⁓ and the incense was a special recipe, I think. ⁓ So it’s not something that you would have smelled at home or in the marketplace. ⁓ would have. So smell is a really strong trigger. Like whenever I smell a certain kind of wood burning, it takes me straight back to a scout camp that I went on, which is my first couple of nights away from home and I got really homesick. But

Dru Johnson (28:00)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Phil Bray (28:22)
It’s still a positive smell because it was a camp in the bush and we shot arrows at things and it was great. But that smell takes me back like 30 something years, like immediately. So to have that one incense smell that would associate you with that space that you wouldn’t smell anywhere else, like that’s a powerful reminder.

Dru Johnson (28:36)
Right.

I will note that it was outside. Well, until the temple, then I guess they move it inside, the smell would disperse, not linger.

Phil Bray (28:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, that’s right. Yep.

But definitely roasting meat. So you would have smelled roasting meat on a fire. ⁓ You would have seen the smoke ascending. So there’s a lot of things that would have combined to communicate something that, you know, there’s food, definitely. The smoke from the food is going upwards.

Dru Johnson (29:03)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Phil Bray (29:25)
that you would see, even if you’d say brought an offering, you know, couple of hours ago, and you’re now sitting at your tent, you can still probably see the smoke ascending into the heavens. ⁓ You’d probably get wafts of the smell. And so you might imagine that that’s the sacrifice I brought a couple of hours ago, you might even be eating it with your family at home now. ⁓ And you would know that the priest is has some of that meat.

might be eating the meat, ⁓ that the smoke from your offering is ascending into the heavens ⁓ and the priest has said that your sacrifice was accepted so that you know that God has accepted the sacrifice as well and then you might even be tasting the meat with your family at home. So it all kind of communicates that the offering that you brought was accepted, that it was a pleasing aroma to God and then all your other senses are involved as well just to reinforce that fact.

Dru Johnson (30:24)
Hmm. Yeah, I always think, actually, there’s a Brazilian friend of mine that pointed out the fatty portions go to Yahweh, and the fatty portions is where the real good smelling smoke comes from, the lean portions. ⁓ Have you ever seen a live animal sacrifice in person? Like, the sacrifice, not just a butchering? Yeah.

Phil Bray (30:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

Not.

Yeah, so not, ⁓ not sacrificed. We, we visited Ethiopia a few years ago before children, when we could travel. Yeah. and so we, ⁓ we were taken there by a coffee company because I had a connection to coffee. and we visited a coffee farm that, ⁓ the, the people who did the tour were buying coffee from this.

Dru Johnson (30:56)
Hmm. Yes. BC. Yeah.

Phil Bray (31:16)
farm. ⁓ And so that he was kind of their source of income. And they were really, really proud to have us there. And they slaughtered an ox for us. ⁓ Yeah, which would have been ⁓ thinking back now, at the time it wasn’t, I mean, it was still amazing that they would slaughter an animal for us. ⁓ But thinking back now, the five and six year olds that we saw there,

Dru Johnson (31:22)
Hmm.

Whoa.

Phil Bray (31:46)
They’d never seen a white person, but they’d also never tasted meat, which was amazing. So to get to like six years old and have never eaten meat, ⁓ it was a pretty special and rare thing for them. So they didn’t cook it, which made me a little bit worried that I was eating raw meat. they kind of, yeah. So they slaughtered the ox.

Dru Johnson (31:49)
Praise.

Mmm. Yeah.

Wait.

Phil Bray (32:15)
They hung it up and then they were just kind of cutting strips off it. And as a butcher, was, it was a really bad way of cutting the meat up, like you do what you can with the instruments that you’ve got. And so they were just like, literally just like hacking at this meat and just tearing strips off. And we were sitting around the fire, but they were just eating raw meat. And I thought, here I am in the middle of like rural Ethiopia. I hope I don’t get sick, but.

Dru Johnson (32:28)
Right, right.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Phil Bray (32:44)
I knew you couldn’t get any fresher than that. I just went with it. Yeah. Yeah. So they didn’t sacrifice it to any, any gods that I know of, but, know, they were still honoring their guests with something that, you know, a five year old had never seen before. It was pretty cool.

Dru Johnson (32:49)
That is pretty fresh. ⁓

Yeah.

Well, I think that’s the conclusion I came to that I think you tie together nicely in the book is that sacrifices often is associated with food more than anything else. It’s food for God, food for us. ⁓ like you said, Wesley Bergen has this great little article where he talks about Westerners who eat meat at a level

unimaginable by ancient people and yet recoil at the idea of the death of an animal and a sacrifice, know, like we, because we’ve completely divorced those two things from each other. And my, my cute way of saying it is, know, that in America, the meat is packaged so as to suggest that no animals were harmed in the production of the kind of a thing. yeah. And I think, ⁓ what you do very nicely, just by the nature of, the, of your occupation in the book is you bring together

the idea of food and sacrifice, which seems to me to be as strong of an image in the atonement as anything else. ⁓ So you mentioned the atonement a couple times. What’s your hot take, or maybe it’s a slow take, on the atonement now, after having spent years going through Leviticus?

Phil Bray (34:22)
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that Leviticus helps to show is that it’s not primarily about the death or the slaughter, that ⁓ sacrifice. And so what you said earlier that you can’t complete the ritual just from reading the text of Leviticus. Like there are bits, like for example,

it’s not instructed that you use a knife. So there’s bits that you would just have to know from the ancient context of how to do sacrifice. ⁓ So the meaning of what you’re doing ⁓ wasn’t focused on the death.

And I think that that helped me rethink atonement where I’d assumed that atonement was all about death. ⁓ the slaughter isn’t primarily about, sorry, the sacrifice isn’t primarily about the slaughter. It actually doesn’t become a sacrifice until something’s placed on the altar. So if you just killed an animal, ⁓ it’s not a sacrifice yet. Even if a priest kills an animal.

Dru Johnson (35:28)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Bray (35:40)
not a sacrifice. It becomes a sacrifice when it’s in a sense dedicated to God and made holy. But part of that process of it becoming holy is the contact with the altar, ⁓ which Jesus says, he says it’s the altar that makes the offering holy. ⁓ So, and it’s because it’s likened to God’s table. The altar is the altar and God’s table, a kind of synonymous language.

⁓ so primarily what a sacrifice is, is a gift given to God. ⁓ and it’s the best gift that you can lay your hands on, whether it’s an animal or grain or something else. But the other thing is that it’s normally food and that’s something that we just don’t really, well, I hadn’t noticed, even though it’s really, really obvious, but yeah, yeah. Everything that’s offered to God is like oil.

Dru Johnson (36:33)
It is really obvious when you step back, but yeah.

Phil Bray (36:40)
or wine or even salt or grain, like cakes made from olive oil and flour or meat. It’s all food. There’s a couple of times when they talk about gold and silver as an offering, but that’s like once. It’s kind of rare. And I think that was for the dedication or the building of the tabernacle. Yeah. But the idea is a gift given to God that

Dru Johnson (37:03)
Great, exactly,

Phil Bray (37:08)
that becomes something holy that is acceptable to God precisely because it’s a holy gift. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (37:15)
⁓

And yeah, so when you look forward to the sacrifice language about Jesus, I think Christian Eberhardt is the one, I think it’s he who makes the point that in the gospels and even in Paul, the discussion of Jesus as a sacrifice is not really focused on his death. It’s focused on that he was acceptable, if I remember correctly.

Phil Bray (37:37)
⁓

Yeah, and that, yep. And so that’s something that still comes up a lot now. ⁓ You can find verses that appear to be saying that Jesus, or they say that Jesus is a sacrifice. But when you look closely, it never says that it never likens the cross or the crucifixion to a sacrifice. It will say things like, ⁓ live a life like Jesus did, who

Dru Johnson (37:53)
Right.

Right.

Phil Bray (38:07)
offered himself or, you know, walk in, is it Ephesians 5.2? Walk in love just as Christ loved us and offered himself as a sweet smelling aroma. So it’s the life that Jesus lived and the selfless offering of himself that’s acceptable, not the murderous, torturous death that he experienced. It’s, yeah.

Dru Johnson (38:11)
Great walk.

Yeah, I mean, is something, it’s funny, this issue came up, I was talking to a friend who’s in India, ⁓ he was talking about the, I had him talking to my class, and he’s in an area of India where it’s not even Hindu, they’re like primitive religion, it’s very interesting area that he lives in. But he, one of the students said, well, like,

are the Christians there who are there, they’re being heavily persecuted. He goes, are they Orthodox? Like, do they believe in the Apostles’ Creed? And this is like one of the most enlightening things I’ve ever heard in the last couple of years. He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do the Apostles’ Creed, but you know, it goes, who was born of a virgin, suffered and died under Pontius Pilate. And he goes, in two sentences, they covered his entire life, ⁓ all the stuff that he did. ⁓ And he goes, for my people, ⁓ we’re really interested, like that.

all that stuff he did when he was alive was actually just as important. And we just kind of consider it historical facts of the miraculous life of Jesus. And he’s like, no, no, no. The fact that he came and touched people, that he went to the persecutor, that the way he lived his life is the most important thing we can think about with Jesus. Where, know, the… Oh, go ahead, sorry.

Phil Bray (39:39)
Sorry to interrupt that it’s I find it strange for myself or paradoxical that I’ve been studying sacrifice and slaughter. But one of the things that it’s highlighted for me is that it’s more about the life than the death. So yeah, what you were saying, like I just did a video on the incarnation because last year I heard a Christmas Day sermon.

Dru Johnson (40:05)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (40:09)
that was about Jesus’ death and I got frustrated. the more I understand sacrifice, the more I understand that it’s the life of the animal and the condition of the life of the animal that makes it acceptable and unblemished. And then when you think about Jesus, ⁓ what makes his offering acceptable and unblemished is his life. And that’s the majority of the gospels.

Dru Johnson (40:34)
Hmm. yeah. Yeah, fascinating.

I wonder, just physically speaking as a butcher, when you get an animal and you’re kind of looking at the insides or whatever, you’re looking at it from this kind of forensic view. Can you tell the difference between the life, like if an animal lived a rough life or not?

Phil Bray (40:55)
Yeah, yes, you can. So, well, apart from the fact that the animals that we have are quite fatty and well fed compared to an animal that might live out in the wilderness and be eating like dry tufts of grass, they’d be kind of a scrawny animal. But yeah, if…

Dru Johnson (41:04)
Right, as they’re supposed to be, right?

Right.

Phil Bray (41:19)
If you get a bit of meat that is, you can tell if it’s been bruised ⁓ and it looks disgusting and feels disgusting and it’s not something that you would serve. So we don’t, you know, it doesn’t go on the shelf. ⁓ But you can tell if an animal was stressed as well. So it has a weird texture and the color is also weird. So if an animal was stressed ⁓ when it was slaughtered, ⁓ it releases a hormone.

Dru Johnson (41:27)
Hmm.

interesting.

Phil Bray (41:50)
that the stress hormone and yeah, and that that stays in the animal and it’s not something that looks attractive and it’s not something that tastes attractive. Yeah, and yeah, so all of that as a butcher, like I know that I wouldn’t serve that to anyone. But as an ancient person offering a sacrifice to your God, you wouldn’t offer it to your God either. You would want the animal to be calm.

Dru Johnson (41:50)
Mm.

Hmm.

Right.

Phil Bray (42:20)
you know, not stressed and not bruised. So all of those things like won’t be bruised, yeah, won’t be beaten. All of the things that stopped a sacrifice being, you know, blameless and acceptable.

Dru Johnson (42:24)
Hmm.

Can you tell just by looking at the animal whether it was a heavy drinker or smoker?

Phil Bray (42:40)
⁓

Dru Johnson (42:43)
Just asking for a friend. OK.

Phil Bray (42:45)
I think that one’s safe.

Dru Johnson (42:49)
Well, know how I always tell students, because I have a bunch of undergrads, ⁓ I’m like, yeah, you go to that 10th high school reunion, ⁓ and you can tell who’s been drinking and smoking pretty heavy for the last 10 years. It’s like all of sudden, things you could hide when you’re younger come out. ⁓

Yeah, I mean, even that what you’re saying, the idea of stressing an animal, ⁓ the thought had occurred to me that if you’re tending to animals in ancient Israel, that you have to be thinking, when you’re looking at your flock, you have to be thinking over time, like, well, which ones am I going to take up to the tabernacle or the temple? And then a very practical problem, which maybe you might have some insight on, if you just take one lamb and you walk it, you know, a week,

the temple, there is a chance that it could break a leg, something could happen to it, right? It’s the hill country. So I always thought, maybe they’re having to drive a few animals if they’re taking them from there. ⁓ If they’re driving animals, of course, there is a provision where they can buy animals locally as well. ⁓ But yeah, it would be a risky move, I would think, just to take one animal to the temple.

Phil Bray (44:01)
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. But definitely they were, the instruction is to select from the flock. So I think that’s a kind of mindful, which one am I gonna choose? And that I think is where the fattened calf idea comes from. The fattened animal is one that you would keep aside and maybe feed extra food. And this is the special one. So it might be used for in the parable of the

Dru Johnson (44:09)
Right. Right.

Phil Bray (44:31)
⁓ What is it? The parable of the son the prodigal son. ⁓ Yeah, the fattened calf is slaughtered. So that’s planned. They’ve kept that one aside, planned for a special occasion. And I imagine that normally it would be offered as a sacrifice. ⁓ And then they would bring the rest of the animal back ⁓ for the celebration. Maybe not every time, but that’s…

Dru Johnson (44:35)
the practical sonya

Right.

Right.

Phil Bray (45:01)
at least in ancient Hebrew thought, that’s how it worked.

Dru Johnson (45:07)
⁓ Okay, so there’s a ton of stuff in Leviticus before I let you go. That’s not about butchering or sacrifice. how do you think about, mean, there’s, you I always think of a Hebrew’s life when they look around, they see grids of things that you can and can’t do. ⁓ That, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, less of a list of rules and more just, and I think we always find it.

Phil Bray (45:27)
Like a spreadsheet. ⁓

Dru Johnson (45:35)
very weird and taxing and then I start thinking like, well there are certain things that I wouldn’t touch because I would consider them unclean even though they look completely fine from the start. I always joke that, you know, because I rarely get sick because I’m, probably the same age, Gen Xers. ⁓ And I say, when I lived in New York City and I came out of the subway, I would lick both hands, you know, just to keep myself healthy. ⁓ But yeah, there…

There is this kind of world that’s like a matrix of go, no-go areas, as Mary Douglas has said, ⁓ clean and profane. ⁓ How do you see the book of Leviticus as a whole? If you were to say, okay, what’s the thumbnail of what Leviticus is doing, ⁓ what do you think it’s doing as a whole text?

Phil Bray (46:23)
This is partly from Tim Mackie probably, but ⁓ as I’ve read Leviticus for myself, the big idea I think is drawing near to God. how can a people, ⁓ sorry, the focus is from God’s perspective, I think, that God wants to live in the midst of his people. ⁓ It’s not so much a people who are eager to hang out with God, because often they weren’t.

Dru Johnson (46:52)
That becomes the problem, yeah.

Phil Bray (46:53)
But

yeah, yeah. But God wants to live in the midst of his people and his people are to draw near to him. ⁓ But there’s problems with how that’s going to happen outside of the garden. ⁓ So, yeah, I think all of the things are showing that ⁓ God wants to live with his people, ⁓ but for the people to be able to come and meet with him or visit him.

draw near to Him. They need to demonstrate that they’re in an appropriate state. ⁓ So one of the things I say in the book, and this is one of the things that I’ve kind of concluded, that we see it as a restriction that you can’t draw near to God unless you’re holy, or you can’t draw near to God in your sin. ⁓ And in a sense, that’s true.

But I think what Leviticus or what God’s teaching through Leviticus and those purity laws is that ⁓ everyone in my presence will be clean. So it’s more a demonstration of in my presence, there will be no death. In my presence, there is no disease. It’s not like if you’ve just touched a dead body or if you have a disease, you can’t come and visit me. ⁓ It’s more…

Dru Johnson (48:04)
Hmm.

Phil Bray (48:21)
when you are in my presence, this is what it looks like to live with me in my presence. Like there will be no disease, no death, no impurity, no more sickness. I think that’s what the image is communicating.

Dru Johnson (48:29)
Hmm.

So God’s presence itself is like a taste of the eschaton, as they say, of what things will eventually be like.

Phil Bray (48:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dru Johnson (48:47)
Which makes sense of, you know, I always accuse a lot of my friends in scholarship, especially of the New Testament variety, ⁓ of reading too much into the temple and the sacrifices of basically thinking that these were like the end all be all. And I always say, well, I mean, it’s not like God wanted to have this whole dog and pony show. ⁓ Not that any dogs or ponies were sacrificed.

It’s not like he was like, you know, it’d be great as if, you know, we had this huge system where we mediated my presence to all of you, but it is a way that he can be amongst Israel. ⁓ But also, as you said, it’s a great way to put it is that he wants to be amongst Israel and that’s the goal. And you you could think of, if I’m reading you right, then this kind of.

for lack of a better word, even though I hate it, like a ceremonial side, like this physical ritual embodied, how do we navigate in the world physically as a people and how do we approach God is paired together with the section of Leviticus. It’s always surprising to people like Leviticus 18, 19, 20, 21, where it’s like, and you can’t exploit people and you can’t steal from people and you can’t, you you can’t judge people unrighteously. So there’s this kind of like the ethical moral side that makes the sacrifice.

worthy of God as well of his presence. So yeah, that fits together very nicely. Okay, the book we’ve been talking about is called Leviticus on the Butcher’s Block. Sorry, I didn’t even know there was a subtitle to this. just now know it says, Making head or tail of the Bible’s toughest book. that’s really clever. I should have picked that up. Yeah, yeah. Well, I should tell people that this book is

Phil Bray (50:23)
There you go. More dad puns. ⁓

Dru Johnson (50:31)
Are there even any other books in the world that do what you’re doing? I don’t think so. I mean, I’m sure there’s something else out there, this is a short, how many pages is this? This is only a hundred pages long, ⁓ a very simple, engaging and punny book with illustrations all the way throughout. have, did somebody you know did the illustrations, right? your wife did it. Okay.

Phil Bray (50:51)
Yeah, my wife. Yeah.

After so, like I was saying before, how a lot of people just preach cognitive sermons. ⁓ And I wanted the book to be, to demonstrate how it’s more of an experience and that uses all of your senses. And someone said, well, you’re writing a book that’s just words. I was like, you’re right. Okay. I’ll put some pictures in there. So my wife did all the illustrations.

Dru Johnson (51:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

The illustrations help. You should have done Scratch and Sniff, too. Do you remember those stickers? Yeah. But this is actually a book you can hand somebody who just can’t get their head around Leviticus where they will actually be able to not only understand large sections of it, like realize why it’s such a profitable ⁓ piece of instruction for God’s people.

Phil Bray (51:20)
Yeah.

Dru Johnson (51:37)
So Phil, ⁓ besides Leviticus is fun on YouTube, anywhere else they should look for you out on the world.

Phil Bray (51:43)
⁓ that’d be the main thing. Leviticus is fun on YouTube. The book. Yep.

Dru Johnson (51:46)
Yeah.

Where you make humorous yet ⁓ seriously engaging content on Leviticus and other things, Torah. Thank you, Phil, for your wisdom.

Phil Bray (51:53)
you

Thank you. Thank you so much.